Emma touches on subjects like friendship, women fertility, marriage, relationships, careers and society´s overall pressure on women throughout the book in a way that just made me feel all the feels. And it’s ok that she’s still figuring it all out, navigating her world without a compass. But life comes with expectations, there are choices to be made and – sometimes – stereotypes to fulfil. So when her best friends’ lives branch away towards marriage and motherhood, leaving the path they’ve always followed together, she starts to question her choices – because life according to Olive looks a little bit different. I don't want to forget that we are still young. It's clear that our lives are at a major crossroads. We are no longer sat at the traffic lights, though, everyone is already zooming off in different directions. I wish everyone and everything would slow down just for a moment." why does Colin tell Olive to "go and have a nice G&T" after the meeting with Cyril, which was at 8am? I know we all have drinking problems in London but jeez.

Still, my generation continues desperately to hunt for things to do in the face of the greatest catastrophe some of us (or our children) may live to see. We give up meat and take holidays closer to home, even when we know that if the super-rich cut their emissions to that of the average EU citizen, global emissions would drop by a third. But we can’t make anyone else do anything, so we do what we can, and we justify our choices as being meaningful, bigger than us. I absolutely LOVED reading Olive. I straight away felt so connected with the main character Olive, I felt a lot of compassion for her as she navigated her recent breakup and the disconnect she felt from her close friends who were either pregnant, had children or were trying for a child. This book really delves into the social construct that all women are expected to want children and if they don’t, something must be wrong with them or they will ultimately change their mind. As a woman who isn’t particularly maternal and has also never really felt the “buzz” of starting a family one day like some of my friends have since the age of 16, I could really see myself in Olive. This book really explores the issues women face, whether they want children or not, whether they can have children or not. Olive is so honest and real, showing how friendships can begin to break down when everyone grows up and starts wanting different things. How navigating adult life can be so difficult, especially when you aren’t hitting the ‘expected milestones’, which can make someone feel so isolated. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and absolutely loved the ending which gave a peek into Olive and her friend’s futures, would definitely recommend! She's a terrible friend - she has zero empathy for the other women (especially Isla, who desperately wants a child through IVF) and constantly feels like she's the one owed an apology. She'd rather feel she's right than make up with her friends - in fact at one point she contemplates walking away from her friends completely. I mean, for what?! What terrible crime have they apparently committed against her? After several best-selling non-fiction books Ctr, Alt, Delete, The Multi-Hyphen Method and The Multi-Hyphen Life, Olive is Gannon’s fiction debut. Olive's is not the only perspective to relate to though - each of her friends have a different relationship to motherhood and family - with one friend struggling to conceive through IVF, another with older children but a struggling marriage and a new mother navigating pregnancy and then life with a baby. Empathy is cultivated for each character, poignantly highlighting the struggles that aren't always seen or understood and yet how easy it is to be jealous without knowing this. While the friendships are strong it doesn't shy away from showing how maintaining connection through such huge life changes can be challenging, and the ways we can miss each other when communicating. I loved how this friendship group feel like the heart of the novel too, over any romantic narratives.Her inner monologue, as we never hear from anyone else, is of a pretty dreadful human being. She moans when her friends are late but continually mooches around and turns up 15 minutes late to all of her meetings – including boasting that she’s so good at her job and so senior that she can turn up when she wants and no-one will challenge her. Children gather at Parliament Square, London, to protest against climate change in February 2020. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP The debut novel about the life-changing choices we makeabout careers, love, friendship, and motherhood from bestselling UK author Emma Gannon. This was fantastic and super relatable. I was gripped from beginning to end. Again it's the kind of contemporary fiction I love - character driven and about the lives of ordinary people. It centres on Olive, a woman of 33 who does not want kids. She's just broken up with her boyfriend of nine years because he wants a family. Surrounding Olive are her 3 best friends she's known since school - Bea, Isla and Cec. The decisions the women make as they grow up, and the differences between them, make up most of the plot. What normally happens at a baby shower then?’ I whisper to Bea. I almost feel like I’ve paid money to be here, and I want a performance.”

The guilt women feel, whether they have multiple children or none, whether they work in an office or at home, whether they take to new motherhood or find it a struggle, whether they conceive naturally or through IVF or sometimes not at all, is the axis of the novel, and Gannon’s four vibrantly drawn characters all suffer from it in some way. The parallels with Dawn O’Porter’s recent novel The Cows are strong, though Olive’s pursuit of a childfree life sets Gannon’s debut apart. Other recent publications dealing with the same issue are Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, an intricate and more intellectual exploration of the subject, and Megham Daum’s collection of essays Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on Their Decision Not to Have Kids. The latter is referenced in Olive, as are contemporary touchstones such as the Moth Storytelling Night, and a CFC event in Shoreditch inspired by its format.This started off well — we have Olive, the only single one in her friendship group, who doesn’t want kids and is surrounded by babies and talk about babies. She’s happy about her career and confident in her decision not to have kids. There were a few relatable moments. We were getting along, and I really enjoyed Sian Clifford’s narration. We meet Olive in her early 30s, where she's coming to terms with the fact that she doesn't want children. Through scenes between the past and present we get to know her and her group of best friends, seeing all their lives change through the decisions they make and how this impacts their relationships. Olive is a contemporary novel about Olive and her three friends, all in their early thirties. Bea is a mother of three, married to a movie director. Cec is a lawyer, pregnant with her first child. Isla is a therapist, who's struggling with fertility issues. Olive, on the other hand, is adamant she doesn't want children, which, of course, causes consternation, reprobations, and a long-term relationship to fall apart. How dare Olive not want what she's supposed to want?

Olive boasts of having feminist credentials – in an early scene, she snaps at someone to turn off R. Kelly because he’s a sexual abuser. Later on, however, she says things like: Taking a group of female friends and exploring their lives and relationships is a staple of contemporary women's fiction, from Maeve Binchy's Circle of Friends to Patricia Scanlan's much loved City Girls series to captivating recent debuts from the likes of Eithne Shorthall and Dawn O'Porter. Olive is at a crossroads in life. The crossroads being her partner of nearly a decade wants kids, and she doesn't. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more novels about wanting and not being able to get kids than there are about not wanting them. Olive adds to the choices of what you can read on the topic. It's worthy of praise for discussing the topic. When asked why I do not have children, I have given various explanations over the years. “It is a complex situation” is vague enough to make most interrogators look ashamed for having asked. If I say, “I am worried about the environment”, parents often tell me in hushed tones that they have wondered whether their children will be able to have children too. (In my meanest moments, I think: “Really? How hard did you think about that?” And then I feel a deep, sour sense of shame, because I have a choice in the matter and rightfully, so do they.) But “I don’t want to” is the only answer that provokes a flinch. Choosing to have children is neither inherently good nor selfish, and the same goes for being child-free

I found the expression of the various friends' prejudices very interesting. The sub-fertile friend who thinks her suffering must be somehow more noble and worth talking about than her newly single friend's loneliness and sense of loss. The general ganging up of the mums against the non-mum, the sense that Olive's life was somehow less valid and interesting in their eyes, her inability to talk about her broken relationship because her friends were so self-interested. All good valid discussions. Wow, thanks for hammering home that moral. Would you like to borrow Mjölnir* and beat it into my head some more, just in case I missed your Big Point? Isla's parents dying in a "freak" car crash. I'm sure it wasn't planned? (reeks of needing to get the word count up??!) The issues Olive faces, from both her friends and strangers is something many women will be familiar with, and it opened a lot of questions and areas to explore for myself personally. I myself have never been sure if I wanted children, and this book is a great step in understanding the different perspectives of women, and encourages us all to be kind to one another no matter where life takes us.

Child-free women are often considered unnatural and cold … Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Ever since my partner and I concluded that we wanted to be child-free, I have looked to books for positive examples of fulfilling and rewarding lives lived without children. The closest I have found have been eccentric spinsters and ambivalent parents, in a long line from Doris Lessing and DH Lawrence, Barbara Pym and Rachel Cusk. There are countless mothers who find their intellectual pursuits strangled by their children and absent husbands (most recently, Fleishmann Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet). Thankfully the book isn't just about not wanting kids. It's also about getting them and wondering why you did it; getting them and losing your husband in the process; getting them and realising that maybe your husband wasn't quite so committed, and failing to get them and getting absolutely obsessed about that absence in your life. Emma is currently working with the Princes Trust and Media Trust charities which helps young people develop their voices in the media. She’s recently been involved with other charities including Women For Women International and Plan International’s ‘Girls Get Equal’. There are also several points where Olive as narrator just comes across as monumentally stupid. I cannot think that this is on purpose, for two reasons: 1) it is just not what most writers aim for, especially in commercial fiction and 2) I can’t give Gannon credit for trying to pull a ‘The Idiot’ style move with her POV character. Here are some of the more egregious examples:I happened to read 2 books about friendship, right after the other and it got me thinking about my own 😌. I actually told my high school friend the other day that I’ve been so blessed when it comes to friends (which I’m super grateful about 🥺). However, that also meant that while I was reading this novel I found myself struggling to understand Olive and her relationship with her friends. I painted a picture of my Big Bright Future through the lens of an old Argos catalogue, and today I am inside that distant future; in the painting, living and breathing it. But I don't have the hand painted tea cups, or the navy blue patterned plates. I don't have a garden slide. And I don't have the baby either.